What is “Deep Color” and why is Deep Color so important?

Basically, deep color expands the colors on the display from millions to billions. This gives a vividness and color accuracy which has not been seen before in display technology. Deep Color defines colors by using an algorithm that can specify any color in that is found in nature. Deep Color gets rid of the on-screen color banding, for tonal transitions that are smooth and graduations of color that are very subtle. It enables increased contrast ratio, and can represent many times more shades of gray between black and white. Deep color with a color bit depth of 24 bit is normally called true color. However, some people use true color interchangeably with deep color.

What deep colors actually means is that there are more colors. With a color bit depth of 30 bit the number of available colors becomes one billion. If the color bit depth is changed to 36 bit, the number of available colors jumps significantly to sixty nine billion colors. If the color bit depth is changed, this time to 48 bit, the available colors will number 2800 times one trillion. This is an enormous amount of colors. Plus a higher bit resolution can display more shades of gray. With 30 bit color depth four times more gray can be represented. Eight times more gray, or even higher, can be represented by a 36 or 48 color bit depth.

Researchers have estimated that the amount of colors seen by the human eyes number in the tens of thousands. But, depending on the lighting conditions and any surrounding colors, a human eye can tell the difference between millions of differing shades, an example is that you’ll be able to distinguish many more shades of black in darkness than you can see in brightness, so the additional shades will show a noticeable difference, but it is uncertain when the number stretching stops becoming useful to the human eye.